Civil War

In our brief review of Nir Rosen's "Anatomy of a Civil War" last week, we consciously chose the title 'The Iraqi Civil War', joining with Rosen and others in crossing the line from 'insurgency' to 'civil war' in describing Iraq's internal conflict.

The label is spreading. NBC caused a kerfuffle today by officially initiating use of the phrase; Dan Froomkin agrees emphatically, and notes that Fareed Zakaria and others do too.

The 'civil war' moniker is appropriate because large segments of the population in a significant portion of the country have taken sides clearly in a conflict with unambiguous differences. This is not a conflict between those in power and those out of power, as the Baathist resistance in 2003 was; nor is it the case of outsider terrorists attacking a society, as the al-Qaeda attacks of 2005 were; this is purely Iraqi-on-Iraqi, with the national security forces aiding and abetting whichever side they identify with.

Civil wars are brutal affairs in the most civilized and cohesive of nations. Spaniards, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Greeks, Indians, Afghans, Cambodians and others all have more shared history and national identity than Iraq does, and all slaughtered their erstwhile neighbors during 20th-century civil wars. Americans, French, Mexicans, Japanese and others were no better in the 19th century. Iraq does not have a very auspicious future, if these great, historic, civilized nations are any indication.

What should the U.S. do? Either call a duck a duck and dramatically intervene, or withdraw posthaste a la John Murtha. Staying around merely gives Iraqi warlords like Moqtada al-Sadr cover for their actions. What would dramatic intervention look like? I think the best option going forward is a forceful division of the country. Give the Kurds their homeland - and all its oil, as a reward for being nonviolent - give the Sunnis the center of the country, and the Shia the south. Make Baghdad a divided city; force each onto its own side, keep a U.S. Green Zone in the middle, and blow the crap out of whoever crosses the line. This would require population exchanges en masse; the same thing was done in India to staunch the bloodbath following partition. This sounds drastic, and awful, but the alternative is the almost total evacuation of Sunni Arabs from Iraq, an eventuality that would be almost certain in case of a U.S. withdrawal.